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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.workstoCurated Tumblr@sh.itjust.worksgroof
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    8 hours ago

    Linguistics is a descriptive science.

    Language though is not science, it’s a cultural practice. Adhering to a specific set of rules to signal belonging to a specific cultural subgroup is perfectly normal; and deviation from those rules is not a socially neutral act. When and how you deviate signals a lot of things about you and what you’re saying.

    That’s why slang is fascinating. It always tells a story. Whether it’s English Prep School jargon that breached containment, whitewashed AAVL, group in-jokes, unconventional emojis, etc., a slang word says a lot about the person who uses it.

    That is to say, if you unironically start saying “rooves”, I can’t say whether you’ll start a trend that will ultimately change English forever (weirder things have happened). But I can assure you that the immediate effect will be that people will label you “tumblr weirdo”. Which would be a correct assessment, so that’s effective subtextual communication. Yay linguistics!



  • There were definitely a couple literal demented sociopath rapists in the mix. What changed wasn’t the law, but the political context and institutions.

    It took decades for the GOP to systematically destroy faith in institutions.

    It took years of Trump presidency followed by a strong reaffirmation of popular support in the last election.

    It took Obama and Biden abdicating their duty to their electorate by respectively refusing to nominate a new Justice and refusing to prosecute Trump for sedition.

    It took the media failing their duty to inform voters of Trump’s past, intentions, and state of mind.

    It took decades of slow work by the right to reframe the media landscape to be less truthful and more obedient.

    It took social media and their algorithms to galvanize fascism.

    It took an entire cold war and war on terror to normalize an absolutely abnormal and near insurmountable militarization of domestic law enforcement.

    The US constitution is not to blame. That’s a cop-out answer, a lame scapegoat. America wouldn’t be saved by passing amendments alone. The rot goes far deeper than that. Just like the 13th amendment didn’t do much to fix the system of racial injustice the US was built on. If it was just a matter of wording, a silly loophole, it wouldn’t have worked. It worked because the vast majority of Americans abdicated their allegiance to the Bill of Rights, to Human Rights, and to Democracy.



  • The central bank facilitating electronic cash flow makes so much more sense than letting random foreign corporations siphon billions in profit they clearly don’t deserve in the slightest from your economy.

    Good on Brazil for breaking free. There’s finally been some push here in the EU for EPI/Wero, but progress has been frigid and online payment processing remains extremely fragmented to the point that if I buy something online outside the Benelux with a small vendor, chances are very high I will have to fall back to an American payment processor, which is insane.


  • And literally not a single one of them is useful for the purpose of quick, efficient, and secure transactions.

    Blockchains are slow and inefficient by design, since they need to build consensus. On any sufficiently popular blockchain, transactions are either fast or secure, never both.

    The “fix” that the crypto industry has come up with is to re-invent banks, except with even more crime and virtually no regulations. Now you’re just entrusting FTX with your coins to enjoy “immediate” transfers, how could that possibly go wrong?


  • They are designed to crumple on impact, absorbing energy by bending - quite a bit actually. You would die if you stood behind a crash barrier in a crash. So it’s a good thing they’re not being put right next to sidewalks, in addition to the accessibility issues.

    The actual thing wrong here is that sidewalks go on streets (slow speed, pedestrian traffic) and crash barriers go on roads (high speeds, no expected pedestrian traffic). If you need pedestrian access between two points only connected by road, build a separated path.

    No pedestrian should feel unsafe due to the lack of a crash barrier, because no pedestrian should be expected to walk next to car traffic going so fast that curbs aren’t enough of a deterrent.

    The problem is North America in particular is infected with stroads, roads with street-like characteristics (i.e. lots of houses, businesses, intersections) but retaining the throughput and speed of a road. This design is fundamentally dangerous, to road users and in particular to pedestrians. There are ways to rehabilitate stroads into streets, but that requires actual thoughtful urban planning and not a bandaid solution like “encase sidewalks in concrete”.




  • If I am not mistaken the 47.0.0.0/8 ip block is for Alibaba cloud

    That’s an ARIN block according to Wikipedia so North America, under Northen Telecom until 2010. It does look like Alibaba operate many networks under that /8, but I very much doubt it’s the whole /8 which would be worth a lot; a /16 is apparently worth around $3-4M, so a /8 can be extrapolated to be worth upwards of a billion dollars! I doubt they put all their eggs into that particular basket. So you’re probably matching a lot of innocent North American IPs with this.



  • Americans: “Best we can do is one large-ish peaceful protest a couple months ago. Ah well, we tried everything, and we’re all out of ideas.”

    Thousands of kids died for Americans’ right to bear arms and yet when the Gestapo jumps out of an unmarked van to kidnap their neighbor the most the average American can manage is to duck and film a TikTok. Absolute disgrace of a country.

    “American ideals”? All bark, no bite. You’ll spend billions making horny patriotic Hollywood movies about how Great and Free you are, but a couple masked bitch-ass Nazi shows up to round up the brown people and the whole neighborhood is suddenly like pwease don’t huwt me mistaw officaw, wight this way, also pwease fuck my wife.

    Your country disgusts me. Not so much because 30 % of y’all are actual Nazis. But because virtually everyone else is a complete coward about it.


  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.workstolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldAny more?
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    6 days ago

    Classful IPv4 was obsoleted 32 years ago. Only 8 years left before it’s literally older than a standard career.

    It’s fascinating the sheer inertia that leads formally-trained IT professionals to use and perpetuate such profoundly useless and obsolete nomenclature. You’d think that having an incorrect use of the term “class A” and not having any use for classes B and C would tip off academia that they should cordon off classful networking to the “History of Computing” course next to ARPANET.

    Maybe next time someone refers to 10.0.0.0/8 as a Class A network I’ll refer to it as the ARPANET Network. That’s only very slightly more anachronistic (3 years).



  • Reading the article, where did you get “audience rewards” == “maximal extraction of cash from the audience”?

    IMO having a very profitable game that will comfortably fund your studio for the next 5-10 years AND that has universal critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase is reward enough. You didn’t lose because you didn’t make the most money out of all your competitors.

    Different games have different audiences. Some people want arcade slop and slot machines to play with friends, they were never going to play BG3 or E33 anyway.

    Important to the conversation as well is the fact that plenty of live-service games have recently failed spectacularly. Remember Concord? Within the industry, that is a clear signal that very high budget online slop isn’t as risk-free as previously assumed, which makes ambitious narrative-driven single player games an interesting diversification strategy for studios.

    It’s not either or. Executives could spend 100M€ on “nearly guaranteed” online slop, or 80M€ on online slop and 20M€ on a good narrative game. And the critical and commercial success of games like BG3 and E33 are definitely moving the needle.
    Especially when micro-economically, there are diminish returns when scaling dev teams. It’s kind of obvious but the first million euros does a lot more for a project than the 100th million. That further strengthens the case for a move away for big players from ONLY funding live-service slop.


  • (They’ve already stated they won’t do Portal: VR because of the nausea issue.)

    I completely agree with your analysis, they would need to completely switch up the ambitions from a writing perspective for Portal 3 to make any sense. There are plenty of super interesting stories to be told in Aperture Labs, but I don’t think that Valve is structured to write any of them

    Valve has always been “gameplay/tech first, story second”, and it just happened that Portal 2 delivered unexpectedly well on the writing. But I don’t think they can make a game with gameplay/tech twice as ambitious as Portal 2, and at the same time double down on Portal 2’s amazing writing. They’re just human and most of the people involved have moved on with their lives; in fact Portal 2 was their last truly ambitious narrative-heavy game, and they had to hire the old writers as consultants to make Alyx (which I haven’t played but from what I heard the narrative wasn’t on HL2’s level).

    I’d love to be proved wrong but IMO there won’t be a Portal 3 for as long as Valve exists in its current form.


  • It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I don’t think Portal 2’s basic formula would be culturally relevant if it was reused today. The quippy writing is very 2010s-coded (à la Guardians of the Galaxy), the gameplay is a bit too simple to be re-used as is in 2025, and the sweet&short linear storyline of Portal 2 would ironically be lacking ambition for a successor to Portal 2.

    Like all truly Great pieces of classic media, Portal 2 is a product of a skilled and truly passionate team getting together at the perfect time with the right idea, and reaching its public at a culturally relevant time.

    The Portal universe still has stories to tell, and there are still test chambers to solve, so I obviously wouldn’t complain if Portal 3 came out, but I understand why Valve wouldn’t want to make a barely decent game in the shadow of Portal 2.




  • So my Fairphone is not supported because the security updates aren’t good enough. Serves me right trying to find an ethical approach to mobile computing.

    I understand GrapheneOS’ philosophy but buying a google product to get away from google software is certainly… a choice. Refurbished or not buying a Pixel would serve Google’s interests, nevermind the fact that I bought my current phone a couple years ago hoping to get close to a decade of use out of it.

    Realistically software freedom on mobile phones is doomed until the industry improves the firmware situation. Every project suffers from severe drawbacks because of it.